Month: June 2016

Palestinian terrorist stabbed a 13-year old to death in her bedroom on Thursday morning after he infiltrated the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, which is located next to Hebron.

“My daughter was sleeping calmly when he [the terrorist] came into her bedroom,” Hallal’s mother Rina told Army Radio. “She was happy,’ she added.

A Magen David Adom paramedic said that when he arrived at the scene the teenage girl, Hallel Yaffa Ariel, was unconscious and was not breathing. They were able to resuscitate her at the scene, but it was touch-and-go during the whole journey to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, as they continuously fought to keep her alive.

The suicide bombers who attacked Istanbul’s main airport, killing 43 people, were nationals from Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a senior Turkish official said Thursday.

The statement came as counter-terror teams launched 16 simultaneous raids in Istanbul, Reuters reports, quoting two unidentified officials. Turkish police said they have detained 13 people, including three foreign nationals, in connection with the attack, local media reported.

The private Dogan news agency said the Russian attacker had entered the country one month ago and left his passport in a house the men had rented in the neighborhood of Fatih.

The tables have turned in this week’s White House Watch. After trailing Hillary Clinton by five points for the prior two weeks, Donald Trump has now taken a four-point lead.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds Trump with 43% of the vote, while Clinton earns 39%. Twelve percent (12%) still like another candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

“The seeds of Jewish destruction lie in passively enabling the enemy to humiliate us. Only when the enemy succeeds in turning the spirit of the Jew into dust and ashes in life, can he turn the Jew into dust and ashes in death.” — Menachem Begin

The seeds of Jewish destruction…I sit here reading these words of Menachem Begin and I know that he was right; worse, he still is, decades after he has left us.

Humiliate us? Actually, in this Begin was a bit off; the latest reincarnation of this horrible fate is that we rush to humiliate ourselves.

With the Islamic State (ISIS) incurring territorial losses in Syria and Iraq — and suffering weakened morale as a result — the jihadist terror group is now setting its sights on Israel, a US official said on Tuesday.

In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about global efforts to defeat ISIS, Brett McGurk — US Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (the acronym used by the White House) — warned that as coalition forces “root out an ISIL presence in the SW tri-border region of Syria adjacent to Jordan and the Golan Heights…[ISIL has] focused on Israel as a target.”

McGurk said this change in strategy — which is partially driven by heavy “losses on the battlefield” — is a result of the terror group’s “hop[e] to generate international headlines to compensate for its defeats.”

McGurk said, the US must not allow ISIS to try to bolster its position and put Israel in its crosshairs.

President Barack Obama spoke strongly in favor of globalization on Wednesday, vowing to pursue an “international order” in spite of the recent decision by voters in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.

“The integration of national economies into a global economy, that’s here. That’s done,” he said after meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Neito at the North America Leaders’ Summit in Canada.

He accused the United Kingdom of trying to escape global responsibility by voting to leave the European Union.

I would point out that Britons voted for their values rather than their Pocket books. They are leaving the EU.

I couldn’t help but notice that given the same choice, Israel is afraid to “leave” the EU.

I was recently told by an insider that Netanyahu is not aggressively preventing the EU from violating our rights in area C because he does not want to risk a Ch VII resolution. So we allow the EU to push us around.

For my part, I think it important that we push back against the EU by various means including demolishing all the illegal structure the Arabs have built in Area C with or without EU money.

Why can the Brits take the heat but Israelis can’t?

Today, Victor Sharpe makes the same point.

The intellect of so many in Israel’s governments have led them along the dead end path of the peace process, forcing them to taste the bitter fruits of appeasement.

[..] The British people groaning under the increasingly onerous and tyrannical power of the European Union finally had had enough and in a national referendum voted to leave the EU and regain their borders and national sovereignty. Other nations, such as Holland, Hungary, Poland and even France, may in time follow Britain’s lead.

But will Israel assert its rights in its own sovereign, ancestral and biblical lands from the River to the Sea?

The normalization agreement between Israel and Turkey is a positive and even critical development, given the regional challenges facing both countries, particularly those originating in Syria and the Gaza Strip. Since the events of the Mavi Marmara in May 2010, ongoing negotiations between Israel and Turkey to resolve the disputes between them have been marked by a series of ups and downs.

Turkey insisted on three conditions for normalization with Israel: an apology, financial compensation, and a lifting of the blockade on Gaza. The first condition was met in March 2013, during the visit by US President Barack Obama to Israel, with a telephone conversation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then-Prime Minister of Turkey. With regard to compensation, already in 2014 an accord was reached on the establishment of a fund that would distribute $20 million to families of the Marmara casualties, so that Israel would not have direct contact with them. The compensation is a direct outgrowth of Israel’s official apology, which constitutes a certain assumption of responsibility (though worded specifically to refer to “errors that may have been made during the course of the incident”).

The argument that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in the world took another blow this month when — for the first time in the history of the United Nations and of Israel — the Israeli ambassador was elected to head one of the U.N.’s permanent committees. This the Legal Committee, also called the Sixth Committee, and its covers the United Nations’ international law operations — which include matters related to terrorism and to the Geneva Conventions.

There was a tough diplomatic fight over this, so it is worth handing out kudos.

T. Belman. Yes, this deal marks the end of a feud on humiliating terms for Israel. But one is left to wonder if there is a secret deal in which, 1. Turkey will stop challenging the blockade, 2. Israel will turn against Kurdish independence to satisfy Turkey, 3. Both countries have agreed on red lines regarding Syria. Turkey will now reconcile with Egypt. But the problem is that Turkey is pro Muslim Brotherhood, where as Egypt and Israel, the opposite. At the end of the day beyond the restoration of diplomatic relations, what will change?

There are three reasons why the Turks wanted the deal now more than ever. First, the Israelis have a lot of natural gas and Cyprus has a lot of natural gas. There have been signals all year that negotiations to find a solution to the Cyprus problem and reunify the island are promising. It seems that the deal with Israel is connected to the coming gas bonanza in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Second, Ankara’s approach to the Middle East has been an utter failure. Its bid to lead the Middle East after the Arab uprisings was based more on the self-reinforcing myths that AKP elites told themselves than their actual ability to drive events in the region. There was also little chance that Saudis, Egyptians, and Emiratis were going to allow the Turks to play the role they sought.

It’s perfectly reasonable to worry about what will happen after Britain’s historic vote to break up with the European Union. Will Brexit provoke Scotland and Northern Ireland to secede from the United Kingdom, leading to its dissolution? Will it embolden other members of the EU to bolt? And will those secessionist movements empower unsavory characters who end up being seduced by Vladimir Putin and modeling themselves on his form of authoritarian populism? Will the dire short-term economic consequences of Brexit create chaos and recession in the long term, too?

As I said, lots of reasons to worry.

But what we’ve seen from a wide range of writers and analysts in the days since the Brexit vote is not necessarily worry. It is shock. Fury. Disgust. Despair. A faith has been shaken, illusions shattered, pieties punctured. This is what happens when a life-orienting system of belief gets smashed on the rocks of history.

Editor’s note: The following is adapted from a speech the author delivered this week at the Westminster Institute in McLean, Va. The topic: “Defenseless in the Face of Our Enemies: What Keeps America from Protecting Itself from Radical Islam.”

Two weekends ago in Orlando, Fla., in the wee hours of the morning, a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub teeming with revelers. After killing and wounding scores of people, he took hostages in a restroom. He began calling police and media outlets, began crafting social-media posts, all for the point of announcing what was already clear to the nightclub denizens who’d heard him screaming, “Allahu Akbar!” — Allah is greater! — as he fired shot after shot: Omar Mateen was a stealth Muslim militant.

Instead, with an assist from the media, she’s going to get off scot-free. Do failures and lies matter any longer? If you are a prominent Democratic politician, what exactly is the level of wrongdoing that will end your career? Reading the long-awaited report from the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the associated media coverage, I was struck by the sheer scale of the failures and the deceptions surrounding the terror attack on the Benghazi compound, and by the mainstream media’s dismissiveness.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the blood libel sounded by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in his address before the European Parliament in Brussels last week is the claim that he ad-libbed the part about rabbis poisoning Palestinian wells.

After refusing to meet President Reuven Rivlin who was also in Brussels last week, Abbas ascended the podium in Brussels and began his custom of demonizing Jewish and Israel. Clearing his throat, the man whose incitement is most responsible for the fact that the Palestinians are the most anti-Semitic people in the world, began his speech by saying, “We are against incitement.”

Then, as is his wont, Abbas proceeded to incite mass murder of Jews by accusing rabbis of ordering the poisoning of Palestinian wells.

T. Belman. After reading this article on the legal exposure, I am convinced that the settlement had no validity. Nor do I think there was any reason to give anything on Hamas or Gaza. My belief it was driven by the need for a gas deal. Without such a deal, Israel could not justify to enormous investment to transport the gas to Europe.

JE Dyer wrote that the deal was done at the urging of Russia. I posted her comment at bottom of this article.

[..] That is right. As with many things legal, the deal is not entirely clear-cut and the flotilla is not entirely over.

The asterisk involves the controversial sea battle on May 31, 2010 between members of the Turkish NGO known as the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation and IDF commandos.

In that encounter off the coast of Gaza, the naval commandos killed nine IHH activists who attacked them when they boarded the MV Mavi Marmara to stop the ship from running Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.

If the government does not get Hamas expelled from Turkey as part of the impending deal, Shurat Hadin will try to block it by going to the High Court of Justice, it threatened on Monday.

The NGO sent a threatening letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the cabinet as part of a last-ditch effort to have the expulsion of Hamas included in the deal.

From Monday’s news conferences and the information provided to the public, Turkey agreed that Hamas would not be allowed to plan terrorist operations from its territory, but did not agree to expel its political wing.

TransCanada Corp. is seeking to recoup $15 billion for the Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, in a legal claim that highlights how foreign companies can use trade deals to challenge U.S. policy.

The Calgary-based pipeline operator filed papers late Friday seeking arbitration under the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that TransCanada had every reason to believe it would win approval to build Keystone XL. Instead, President Barack Obama last November determined that the pipeline, which would have carried Canadian oil sands crude to the U.S. Gulf coast, wasn’t in the national interest. In response, TransCanada in January vowed to use arbitration provisions in Chapter 11 of Nafta to recover costs and damages.

The Israel-Turkey reconciliation agreement announced this week is an object lesson in the importance of being willing to walk away from negotiations. For six years, the Israeli chattering classes and the international community urged Israel to simply accept Turkey’s terms, arguing that Ankara wasn’t going to soften its demands and that Israel desperately needed good relations with Turkey, whatever the price. But it turns out neither part of that argument was true: Turkey proved to need Israel far more than Israel needed it, and consequently, it eventually reduced its demands significantly. The current deal is thus much better than what Israel would have gotten had it caved in and signed earlier.